"Bileti v kassye" ("The Tickets Are Waiting for You at the Box Office") by Nekod Zinger, Gishrei Tarbut, 477 pages (in Russian)

The detente and thawing of relations between the U.S. and the Communist Bloc affected not only the nuclear balance of terror but also, and perhaps principally, the daily lives of Soviet citizens. Throughout the 1970s they continued to conduct their lives behind the Iron Curtain, although it was beginning to lift, exposing them to the Western way of life and attitudes. Adolescents were exposed to the Beatles and the Voice of America on the one hand, and Leonid Brezhnev's speeches and Communist propaganda posters on the other.

The lives of Jewish adolescents were even more confusing because they were also being exposed to the concepts of Zionism and Jewish nationalism. The 1967 Six-Day War, in particular, awakened Zionist sentiments and inspired the mass wave of immigration to Israel in the 1970s. That period and those teenagers are the focus of Nekod Zinger's new book.

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Zinger was born in Novosibirsk and arrived in Israel in the late 1980s. He settled in Jerusalem, which became a center of Russian immigrant artistic and literary activity. Zinger's writings and translations have appeared in Russian-language literary magazines and he has edited various journals, including the Hebrew-Russian "Nekudotayim." Zinger calls "Bileti," his first book, "bio-autobiography." Although he includes memoirs from childhood and adolescence, he will not confirm their veracity, and while reading you may find yourself asking what parts are historical memory and what parts are simply fiction.

The book provides a glimpse into the lives of Novosibirsk's young people during the 1970s. This large industrial city, whose population is primarily working-class, has, for centuries, become home to Russians who decided to stay after serving their term of exile in Siberia. Despite its distance from St. Petersburg's historical majesty and Moscow's bustling streets, its young people consider Novosibirsk an exciting place. They cheat on exams, draw pictures of naked girls, get drunk and do the same kinds of things that adolescents all over do and have always done.

Most of the book consists of episodes, the majority of which are amusing, from Zinger's childhood and adolescence. Nevertheless, despite his brilliant writing style, I found these less interesting than his insights on Jewish life in Russia and on the Soviet regime.

Most of Zinger's characters - classmates and neighborhood children - are Jewish, and in order to describe their thoughts and innermost feelings he enters the realm of fantasy. His classmates of both sexes are recruited into the First Jenny Marx Jewish Battalion, a pure figment named after Karl Marx's daughter. Although it is sent to the front without any weapons, it is ideologically invulnerable and thus capable of fighting the Zionist enemy threatening the Soviet Union under the aegis of world capitalist imperialism.

Zinger's Jewish soldiers resemble the Good Soldier Schweik rather than Bar Kochba, as they travel by train throughout Siberia, drinking and talking about life: One argues with his comrades about Jewish identity, another discusses the advantages of circumcision, while a third recounts the story of a good friend who wanted to move to Israel but whose family stopped him out of fear of the disgrace - and perhaps bodily harm - it might cause them.

The Jews' complex relationship with the Soviet regime is expressed through the character of the guide, Gregory Schatz, who is a politruk (political officer). It is hard to keep from chuckling when he delivers a speech to his subordinates. Seeking to instill a true combat spirit, he calls on them to fight the dark Zionist forces in the name of "our Kyrgyz and Uzbek brothers and sisters." However, our chuckling is mixed with a certain bitterness, because it is difficult not to feel compassion for the many Jews who were torn between two identities and two ideologies that simply could not coexist.

Zinger's attitude toward the Soviet regime is complex. On the one hand, he mocks it in his anecdotes, such as the one about the elementary-school teacher who forbade him from drawing Lenin because that would be sacrilege. On the other hand, he is not venomous or filled with hatred like other post-Soviet authors.

Despite its entertaining theme, the novel is not easy to read. It has no structured plot nor does it follow a chronological order; instead, it consists of a series of vignettes that pass through the narrator's consciousness. This novel has a reflexive dimension and, at times, the characters begin to talk with the omniscient narrator and to point out to him that his description of them is not faithful. Toward the end, one even asks him why he is not writing it in Hebrew and why he is not discussing the problems of contemporary Israeli society. This is a question that Hebrew-speaking readers often raise about authors who write in Russian although they live here in Israel. Zinger's narrator refuses to answer this question, dismissing the inquiring character with a wave of the hand.

Kira Ablamonitz studies literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.